Solar System by Jian Guo on inprnt
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oh my fucknign god
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Fun with pill time (all prescribed and taken as prescribed): solar system edition! The sun is my girlfriend’s phone flashlight, Mercury is a Klonopin, Venus is one brand of Zoloft, Earth and its moon are another brand-and-a-half (three different brands over three months), Mars is a Risperdal, Jupiter is a mason jar lid and it’s storm eye is the other half of the Zoloft, Saturn is a pill bottle cap with a Seroquel ring (I only take one Seroquel but needed a full ring), and Uranus and Neptune are bottle caps. Sorry for not including Pluto, I didn’t have a small enough pill and it’s also not a planet, but a trans-Neptunian object. Actually, there’s a bit of a Classical background to why I’m on the “Pluto isn’t a planet” side: the stars being lightyears away are on a fixed movement, but the ancients noticed seven “stars” that went their own way, so they called them “planet,” which means “wanderer” or “drifter.” It’s actually related to the word “plankton,” which doesn’t describe a specific creature so much as a class of creature that “drifts” in the sea–also an individual organism is called a plankter. Anyway, they named the seven planets after Roman gods. (Mythology doesn’t correspond 1:1 with religion, so having Saturn and Jupiter may be contrary to the story of Zeus [Jupiter] killing Cronus [Saturn] in the Titanomachy, but Saturn in formalized Roman worship was a syncretism of a Roman harvest god and the grandfather of the gods–Uranus would be the great-grandfather, being the “sky” to Gaia, our “earth.” By the way, there’s a Roman myth that Zeus castrated Cronus and when he threw his dad’s pendulous dudes into the sea, the foam created Venus [Aphrodite] at Cythera, a Greek island–depicted by Botticelli in The Birth of Venus–hence one of her epithets Cytherea, which would be really cool if Wikipedia didn’t automatically show you to a porn actress known for “squirting.”) The astrological seven planets, earth, and the moon were canon until the early twentieth century when some dude in an observatory was looking at pictures taken deep beyond Neptune and found another “wandering” body, which we named Pluto after the god of deep darkness. So the classical tradition of seven planets didn’t include Pluto, which was discovered by modern astronomy and not ancient astrology. So, when science further discovers that it doesn’t orbit the sun right and isn’t orbited right by its moon and isn’t alone among trans-Neptunian objects and it’s kinda small? Astronomy demoted it and pre-20th century astrological traditions didn’t include it anyway. There’s a pagan/agnostic tradition described in the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles 17.23 that might help if that appeals to you: Athens had a shrine dedicated to agnostos theos, (Vulgate Latin: ignotus deus), the unknown god, just in case they were missing one in their devotions. If you blended that with a semi-probable contemporary tradition of an unknown “wanderer,” you could justifiably have Pluto in at least your astrology.
2 cold friendo
If it’s 4x the size and 10x the mass (like the article says) of earth isn’t it a possibility that there’s still geothermal energy being put out? I know Mars grew cold a long time ago and it’s only marginally smaller in comparison, so theoretically there could be life that uses geothermal vents for energy, possibly underwater. People have speculated similarly about one of the moons of Jupiter (but in that case the energy was coming from tidal friction from Jupiter)
Look I’ve been up for 29 hours so my math is probably off but if something is 4x the diameter and 10x the mass of earth, it would be just way too dense to be made of anything other than, like, solid metal.
So I went and looked at the academic paper and they never even mention it being 4x the size of earth. The caltech news article that I pulled up (remember these researchers are from caltech) never mention a 4x size number either. I have no idea where The Guardian got that number, but I found the Washington Post mentions it too, but it’s never mentioned anywhere in any scientific news sources, so I’m disregarding it entirely.
The only thing mentioning the possible dimensions in the academic paper is that it’s between 1 and 10 times the mass of Earth.
Because the only thing we have is mass, there’s no way to determine density or that it’s a rocky planet like people seem to default it to.
Logically, it would probably be a gas giant similar to both Uranus and Neptune. Uranus is 15 earth masses and Neptune is 17 earth masses. It would probably have a very similar composition with a miles thick atmosphere, then underneath that, miles and miles of ice, and below that, a tiny rocky core.
So from that, and because the rocky core is actually quite small, (most likely smaller than that of Earth) it probably isn’t geothermally active anymore.
oh my fucknign god
2 cold friendo
If it’s 4x the size and 10x the mass (like the article says) of earth isn’t it a possibility that there’s still geothermal energy being put out? I know Mars grew cold a long time ago and it’s only marginally smaller in comparison, so theoretically there could be life that uses geothermal vents for energy, possibly underwater. People have speculated similarly about one of the moons of Jupiter (but in that case the energy was coming from tidal friction from Jupiter)
Look I’ve been up for 29 hours so my math is probably off but if something is 4x the diameter and 10x the mass of earth, it would be just way too dense to be made of anything other than, like, solid metal.
So I went and looked at the academic paper and they never even mention it being 4x the size of earth. The caltech news article that I pulled up (remember these researchers are from caltech) never mention a 4x size number either. I have no idea where The Guardian got that number, but I found the Washington Post mentions it too, but it’s never mentioned anywhere in any scientific news sources, so I’m disregarding it entirely.
The only thing mentioning the possible dimensions in the academic paper is that it’s between 1 and 10 times the mass of Earth.
Because the only thing we have is mass, there’s no way to determine density or that it’s a rocky planet like people seem to default it to.
Logically, it would probably be a gas giant similar to both Uranus and Neptune. Uranus is 15 earth masses and Neptune is 17 earth masses. It would probably have a very similar composition with a miles thick atmosphere, then underneath that, miles and miles of ice, and below that, a tiny rocky core.
So from that, and because the rocky core is actually quite small, (most likely smaller than that of Earth) it probably isn’t geothermally active anymore.
The language of the article seemed to imply it was a rocky planet, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and at the time of reading it I had also been up for more than a day and now I’ve realized we have no bloody clue what it’s made of because we’re not even sure it exists. I believe the assumption comes from general patterns in exoplanets that we’ve found in the past several years, and there are rocky bodies many times the mass of the earth, in fact we’ve found many more of those than we have planets with similar masses to the Earth. The question was mentioned in the article that if they’re so common why doesn’t our solar system have any, the answer to that question was well maybe this one is.
It is a possibility that it has 10x the mass and the basic same layering as Earth. Although from what I’ve learned of Earth’s formation we do have an unusually large iron core, in comparison to say Mars, due to the collision that formed our moon. It is a strong possibility that it’s another gas giant but ya know. Ice aliens.
”in fact we’ve found many more of those than we have planets with similar masses to the Earth.”
That’s because Kepler, the telescope that’s finding all these exoplanets, is doing so by looking at light curves from distant stars. Only large planets cause noticeable light dips, while Earth-sized planets go unnoticed. And if you’ll look at this graph of exoplanets, you’ll find that of the exoplanets found, most are larger than jupiter, and gaseous.
Sorry about the quality, it’s from a textbook. Red dots are exoplanets, green dots are our planets, the green band at the bottom is terrestrial planets. Most exoplanets fall in the ‘hot jupiter’ and jovian ranges, with very few being terrestrial at all, let alone super earths.
The question they should be asking is “Why don’t we have more gas giants?”
And to be honest, the Guardian is sensationalist and they use the ‘rocky planet = aliens’ trope that people believe in to get more hype for their article. Most science based news sources believe the planet to be a gaseous ice ball.
Earth is not the only planet in our solar system with auroras. As the solar wind—a stream of rarefied plasma from our sun—blows through the solar system, it interacts with the magnetic fields of other planets as well as our own. Saturn’s magnetic field second only to Jupiter’s in strength. This strong magnetosphere deflects many of the solar wind’s energetic particles, but, as on Earth, some of the particles get drawn in along Saturn’s magnetic field lines. These lines converge at the poles, where the high-energy particles interact with the gases in the upper reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere. As a result, Saturn, like Earth, has impressive and colorful light displays around its poles. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser & L. Calçada, source video; via spaceplasma)
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims have surfaced every few months that Voyager 1 has “left our solar system”.
Voyager 1 is exploring an even more unfamiliar place than our Earth’s sea floors — a place more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from our sun. It has been sending back so much unexpected data that the science team has been grappling with the question of how to explain all the information. None of the handful of models the Voyager team uses as blueprints have accounted for the observations about the transition between our heliosphere and the interstellar medium in detail. The team has known it might take months, or longer, to understand the data fully and draw their conclusions.
Since the 1960s, most scientists have defined our solar system as going out to the Oort Cloud, where the comets that swing by our sun on long timescales originate. That area is where the gravity of other stars begins to dominate that of the sun. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it. Informally, of course, “solar system” typically means the planetary neighborhood around our sun. Because of this ambiguity, the Voyager team has lately favored talking about interstellar space, which is specifically the space between each star’s realm of plasma influence.
Voyager 1, which is working with a finite power supply, has enough electrical power to keep operating the fields and particles science instruments through at least 2020, which will mark 43 years of continual operation. At that point, mission managers will have to start turning off these instruments one by one to conserve power, with the last one turning off around 2025.
The spacecraft will continue sending engineering data for a few more years after the last science instrument is turned off, but after that it will be sailing on as a silent ambassador. In about 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own sun. (AC +79 3888 is traveling toward us faster than we are traveling towards it, so while Alpha Centauri is the next closest star now, it won’t be in 40,000 years.) And for the rest of time, Voyager 1 will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.
For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
This videos shows how high you would be able to jump on each planet of our Solar System!
The moon handing us its resume to become a planet:
The moon has the exact same orbital speed as it’s rotation speed. Doesn’t even vary by .0001. It always faces us. And no one is bothered by it.
Tidal lock is a normal and explicable phenomenon! Most of the moons in the Solar system are tidally locked to their planets. Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to one another.
A few years ago, my grandfather read about some moon-related conspiracy theory hinging on the idea that Luna’s tidal lock could only be the outcome of (extraterrestrial!) artifice, and I got to explain to him that it’s been physically explicable since Newton (or so).
Also, it varies by way more than .0001. (0.0001 what? Percent? Seconds? Fortnights?) Over the course of a month, about 59% of the Moon’s surface is visible from Earth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lunar_libration_with_phase_Oct_2007_450px.gif
With the days rapidly dwindling until New Horizons makes humanity’s first reconnaissance of Pluto, a stunning new video was released showing the mission’s planetary predecessors.
Paying homage to over 50 years of planetary exploration, the National Space Society’s video shows the groundbreaking missions which opened up the solar system to all of us back here on Earth.
Through the Pioneer, Mariner, and Voyager missions, the worlds of the solar system were no longer mysterious to scientists and astronomers on Earth. The years of the planet’s first reconnaissance and spacecraft are shown in a fitting tribute to New Horizon’s foundations.
Now, 53 years after our initial visits to other worlds, our exploration of the solar system’s major celestial bodies draws to a close. We’ve spent half a century broadening our cosmic horizons; what new horizons will be found at, and beyond, Pluto?
